Assange Called Don Jr Hours Before He Released the Emails

The Trump/Russia collusion narrative received a breathe of new life over the weekend after it was revealed that President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., had met with a Russian lawyer to ostensibly obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton during the heated 2016 campaign season.

On Tuesday, Trump Jr. publicly released an email chain between himself and an acquaintance named Rob Goldstone, a British talent manager who had arranged for the meeting to take place with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya. The meeting reportedly resulted in nothing of consequence, save providing fresh fuel to the smoldering embers of the liberal media Russian meddling narrative.

According to the Washington Examiner, Trump Jr. may very well have released those messages detailing the set-up of the meeting on the advice of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who claimed on Twitter to have conversed with the president’s son mere hours before the email chain was revealed in a social media post.

USA Today reported that one of Assange’s followers had commented on the tweet, asking if he viewed the development as a “positive or negative maneuver,” which prompted a three-part reply from the WikiLeaks publisher.

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“I argued that his enemies have it — so why not the public?” Assange replied. “His enemies will just milk isolated phrases for weeks or months … with their own context, spin and according to their own strategic timetable. Better to be transparent and have the full context … but would have been safer for us to publish it anonymously sourced. By publishing it himself it is easier to submit as evidence.”

(1/3) I argued that his enemies have it–so why not the public? His enemies will just milk isolated phrases for weeks or months…

For those who may have missed it, here is the statement and email chain that was posted to Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. in the interest of transparency, purportedly just hours before The New York Times was going to publish the emails themselves, though there is no word on how the media outlet got its hands on them.

Obviously, we have no way to independently verify whether Assange and Trump Jr. truly did speak just hours prior to the release of the email chain. Nevertheless, the WikiLeaks founder who knows a thing or two about leaked emails has placed himself near the middle of this latest firestorm regarding private online correspondences being made public.